Published for the first time in 1971, Forty Lost Years tells the captivating story of Laura Vidal, a working-class woman who becomes a high-fashion dressmaker to the bourgeois ladies of Barcelona during Franco’s dictatorship. Beginning in 1931, with the proclamation of the Republic, and ending in the 1970s, Rosa Maria Arquimbau’s masterpiece paints a vivid picture of forty years in Catalan history. Weaving the personal and the political, Forty Lost Years is a bitter tale that immerses readers into the frivolous atmosphere of a sexually liberal republican Barcelona, and the despair of a country defeated by the Fascists.

“The author filters her own experiences and reflections on the period through her magnificent prose and a prism of personal and political insights that perfectly represent living under a dictatorship and the pain and suffering that society went through. An essential book.” —Esther Vilar Portillo, Caràcters

“A beautifully written, bitter novel about the loss of innocence. Its disenchanted, melancholic tone sets the scene for what is one of the most powerful novels about life under Franco.” —Pere Guixà, La Vanguardia